Green powering a campus for the price of a six-pack

Nationally, fewer than five percent of Americans say they purchase green (or clean) power, usually by paying extra each month for energy derived from sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biogas and biomass. Portland General Electric's customers participate at a higher rate than most utilities in the nation -- 8.5 percent in 2007.

But if you want to know what would it be like for nearly your whole city to run on green power, you gotta ask a Beaver.

Students at Oregon State University in Corvallis voted last year to tax themselves $8.50 each, per term, and use the funds to purchase green energy to power the campus. The tally for 2007-08: OSU bought 66,680,400 kilo-watt hours (kWh) of green power last year, equal to about 75 percent of total campus electrical consumption, according to an OSU news release. The campus goal is to use 100 percent renewable energy.

Sure, you could argue that OSU students should put their extra dollars toward ever-rising tuition payments and paying off their student loans. On the other hand, they could've used that $8.50 to buy another six-pack. Or twelve-pack, depending on your taste in beer.

Instead, OSU's green power purchase -- the fourth-largest among 40 competing universities nationwide -- was enough to make it the Pacific-10 conference champion in The Environmental Protection Agency's Green Power Challenge. The EPA estimates OSU's green power purchase last year was equal to the amount of energy needed annually to power more than 7,000 U.S. homes, or to avoid carbon dioxide emissions from nearly 7,000 cars.

By winning the PAC-10, the Beavers beat the likes of University of Washington, UCLA and University of Arizona. Alas, even in green-minded Oregon, the Beavs could not beat those annoying Ivy League overachievers. UPenn bought the most green power of all -- 192,727,000 kWh. The combined Ivies bested 17 other conferences with a total purchase of more than 220 million kWh, which the EPA says has the equivalent impact of avoiding the carbon dioxide emissions from nearly 32,000 vehicles.